According to an independent analytics firm, Google has reached its lowest share of the US internet search market since 2008. Yahoo! on the other hand has reached its highest share in 5 years.

In December, StatCounter reported that Google handled 75.2 per cent of US online search referrals. Ever since the analytics firm started tracking data more than six years ago, Google has slipped to its lowest record. A year before, the giant tech company handled 79.3 percent.

Despite a slight decrease in market share, Google remains a leader in the US Internet search market by a wide margin. It is followed by Bing from Microsoft at 12.5 percent and Yahoo! at 10.4 percent. The formers’ highest share since 2009.

A year before, Yahoo handled only 7.4 percent of the search market. Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, has constantly reminded others that the tech company is devoted to the search market it helped pioneer. The market was eventually dominated by Google.

The changes in Yahoo’s share can be attributed to a deal made between the company and Mozilla to make Yahoo the default search engine in Mozilla’s Firefox browser. It replaced Google which was the previous default search engine in the browser developed in 2004.

Between November and December of last year, Statcounter reports a drop of 2 percent in Google’s search share.

“The move by Mozilla has had a definite impact on US search,” StatCounter chief executive officer Aodhan Cullen said. “The question now is whether Firefox users switch back to Google.”

According to StatCounter, Firefox accounts for more than 12 percent of US internet usage for the month of December.